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Month: August 2013

We’ve covered the chuppah, so here is the sweater I knit for Amanda’s wedding. To be fair, I started it without having the wedding specifically in mind, but the general idea of this sweater was “neutral-colored thing to wear over summer dresses in the evening,” so I quickly realized it would work well for this occasion and motored to finish it in time. The pattern is Emelie and the yarn is Anne Hanson’s Breakfast Blend Fingering in “Oatmeal.” This was a case where the yarn was the inspiration for the project — Anne brought this yarn out in (I think) the early spring and I was desperate to knit with it, and it occurred to me that the “Oatmeal” colorway would be perfect for “neutral-colored thing to wear over summer dresses in the evening.” So I looked through my Ravelry queue, and Emelie seemed to fit the bill. I loved how customizable the pattern is, and the trim, tailored look of the whole thing.

Foolishly we didn’t get any pictures of the sweater at the gorgeous wedding location, so you’ll have to settle for these beer-wielding reception pictures. I chose to knit the 11″ version of this sweater, going for a cropped look — it works great with dresses like this, but I have a little regret that I didn’t knit the 13″ length, which would have been more versatile. I’m going to have to decide how I feel about visible swaths of t-shirted midriff. But a bonus of knitting it at this length is that my whole third skein of yarn is untouched! So I think I’m going to knit a pair of Anne’s delicious Waffle Creams socks with the leftovers.

Aaand I’ll leave you with a grainy-but-amusing after-dark shot. ‘Til next time!

The only “action shots” I have are iPhone pictures for now, but this is the chuppah that I knitted for my friend Amanda’s wedding. I was thrilled to be asked to do it, and immediately started scouring the internet for patterns. I was only able to find one real chuppah pattern out there, and I wasn’t thrilled with it, so I initially planned to knit a cabled blanket pattern. I consulted with the bride about colors, and decided to knit it in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Fjord Heather. It was going to look lovely, but I was starting to have doubts because it was also going to be very heavy. Then this spring Kirsten Kapur released a square shawl pattern that I instantly knew would be perfect for a chuppah: Water Music. I loved the openwork, and thought it would be lovely in the sun — and it was! I love how you can see the dappled shadows on Amanda in this shot.

I hoped that just knitting this pattern in heavier yarn on larger needles would result in a large enough chuppah, but near the end I could tell that I’d need to add more rows, so I did another repeat or two of Chart 3 and I also added some more garter stitch to the border. I was aiming for 5′ x 5′, and after an aggressive blocking the finished product came out to just shy of that, which turned out to work fine. Here it is pinned out on my floor:

Isn’t this gorgeous? I was so happy with how it came out. But my apartment is small enough that this required furniture-moving! I cleverly finished this up right before Pat and I took a week-long trip to the east coast, so I pinned it out the night before we left and unpinned it when we got back — so we didn’t actually have to live with awkwardly-positioned furniture.

The ceremony was lovely, and I was so honored to be able to contribute to it! I also knit a sweater to wear to the wedding, but I’ll save that for a separate post. Until next time!

My parents are cleaning out their house in vague preparations to downsize and move sometime in the next year or two, and one of the things my mother unearthed was this great 1975 pattern book for Brunswick yarn, along with an unfinished crochet afghan she’d been making from this book in the 70s and a whole bunch of yarn that had been earmarked for the project. There are some great pictures in this thing! The top photo is my favorite; it’s from the back cover.

Here’s the front cover. I guess it’s the same model, but it’s not quite as amusing as her sassy cigarette pose:

Upon reflection, though, very little about this picture makes sense. “Oh, it’s just little old me, in my glamorous makeup, wrapped up in this giant afghan, crouching on the ground outside.” Maybe she came over for a fancy barbecue (if that’s a thing) and drastically underdressed for the weather?

But the real prize for absurdity has to go to this shot:

My mom calls this a “James Bond girl shot,” and I think she’s onto something. “Dahlink, vhy don’t you step into the kitchen for a drink and some snuggles?” The pattern for that dress is in this book, too, and interestingly the only sizes for the clothing in this booklet are 12, 14, and 16 (with bust measurements of this dress coming in at 41″, 43″, and 45″). They probably intend for some positive ease, but I think that speaks volumes about how size standards have changed over the years. (And about how knitting patterns have become more user friendly, presented in a wider array of sizes!)

Here’s one more gem for you:

Oh yes, you can knit her all-yellow outfit if you choose!

I elected not to finish my mom’s crochet afghan, for several reasons. (1) I’m not much of a crocheter. Even though it was a simple shell pattern and would have been within my abilities, it would have been tough to work on in front of the TV, where is where I do 95% of my knitting. (2) She’d given up on it because her gauge had gotten wonky, so there would be some significant fixing I’d have to do. (3) There were eleventy billion ends to weave in already, and the thing wasn’t even half done. And (4) there was enough of her yarn leftover for me to just knit a blanket myself that would be both more fun for me to work on and more functional as an end product — shell stitch produces a fabric full of holes.

I decided to just freestyle a garter stitch blanket, in part because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to determine how much yarn I actually had, since the labels on this yarn list its weight in ounces but bizarrely not its yardage. After I’d embarked on this plan, though, I thought to look the yarn up on Ravelry and lo and behold, there it is despite its being long-discontinued: Brunswick Germantown. I have the older 4-ounce skeins, and I could have calculated my yardage and followed a pattern, but I’ve been having so darn much fun doing this that I see no reason to stop:

I’m using the Mason-Dixon Moderne Baby Blanket as inspiration, but I’m not really following the pattern at all — just deciding for myself what colors will look best where. The main insight that pattern gave me was the idea of using intarsia to break up rows into multiple color blocks, which you can see that I’m doing on the top right now and already did on the right hand side. I’d never actually done intarsia before, but it turns out to be stupidly easy and basically exactly like fair-isle knitting except you don’t carry the strand along with you; you just knit in blocks and twist the strands at the color changes. I expect that the hardest things about it are following complicated patterns that call for it and keeping your tension even at the transition points, but here the “pattern” is dirt simple and the transitions are easily managed. I’m having so much fun with this thing that I’m finding it really tough to put down, despite the fact that it’s growing into a sizable wool blanket and it’s the middle of August! Of course, it’s also been a shockingly mild summer here in southern California, and the hottest months are probably ahead of us — September and October are usually the worst. So this blanket probably won’t be finished until the fall, but it’ll be a fun thing to pick up now and then until the cooler weather hits!